


caught in the joyous machinery of nature

by tomato_greens



Category: Inception (2010), Mysterious Skin (2005), RocknRolla (2008)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, M/M, Past Abuse, Please read the warnings in the author's note!, disturbing imagery
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-06-08
Updated: 2012-06-08
Packaged: 2017-11-07 08:09:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,354
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/428816
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tomato_greens/pseuds/tomato_greens
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Neil's always had big dreams.</p>
            </blockquote>





	caught in the joyous machinery of nature

**Author's Note:**

> This is a WIP––a serious, serious WIP. Like, it's maybe a fifth done. But I'm trying to get myself to finish it, so I'm posting it here!
> 
> Warnings are mostly for Neil McCormick's past and for military-related violence––so, child abuse and its consequences, including some violent dream imagery and implications of PTSD; please be careful with this one, and please be safe, internet. <3
> 
> Thank you forever to the incomparable terribilita, who beta'd some of this!

The one thing that Neil McCormick can say for spending Christmas in Asscrack, Kansas is that it wasn't the Christmas he was expecting to have.

By the time Neil gets back to New York, there's just the puffy suggestion of his black eye––not enough that anyone asks, anyway, which is really all he can ask for. SUBZ is still small and shitty and he comes home smelling like stale potato chips, but he's got the routine down: when someone wants a number 3, hold the mayo, extra tomatoes, he no longer has to check the cheat sheet under the counter. This, he tells Wendy, is an accomplishment that's worth at least a joint.

Wendy has never said no to a hit when she didn't have to, so they sit in their shitty apartment on their mutual night off and don't bother to wave the smoke away from the ancient detector, which hasn't had batteries since approximately 1976. Neil's head is on her lap and she's stroking his hair, because Wendy has always had this weird maternal instinct that she tries to hide behind her bright clothes and really fucking bizarre make-up; but Neil knows her inside and out, just like she knows him. 

They talk about cats, for a while––Wendy wants one––and the oceans and oceans of things they'll never know, the Escher poster their high school guidance counselor had stuck hopefully to the wall like it wasn’t a representation of everything Asscrack was and wasn’t, an endless uphill circle, and the voice of God, and then,

"I am glad, you know," she tells him, blowing smoke affectionately into his hair.

"Glad about what?" he asks. He's reached the point of the high where he's just on the edge of loose and dreamy. 

"That you stopped. You know."

"Jesus Christ," he says, sitting up fast, "would you just stop bringing that up?"

"Neil," she says.

"Don't Neil me," he barks and stands up.

"Neil, come on, you're not being fair."

"Yeah, well, you just fucked up my high, you fucking––the fucking highlight of my week," he says, and shuts himself in the bathroom, which is their usual place to escape each other.

But he can't stay there, he can't, he feels like his skin is itching and somebody's watching him from the windows, so he shoves the door open and crawls back out and somehow ends up with his eyes shut and his face tucked into Wendy's hip again. 

"Sorry," he mumbles.

"Is the great Neil McCormick apologizing?" she asks, her voice hovering between surprise and resignation, and takes another drag because she's Wendy and she can't not. 

"Shut up," Neil orders. It's not particularly heated. He wouldn't apologize at all, with anyone else.

"You're one to talk," Wendy says, probably rolling her eyes. Her hand winds its way back into his hair, though, and Neil knows he will always be able to forgive her everything––that she will always forgive him anything, as long as he asks.

-

So he goes to work and he goes to sleep and one day, when he's walking through Midtown because he can't think of anything better to do, he shoves a few tourists out of the way and goes into the recruitment center sitting in the middle of Times Square. He eyes the door for a few seconds and then walks in.

It's smaller than it seemed on the outside, but that could because of the four cubicles stuffed into the narrow building. Neil drifts into the first one he sees, which is plastered with brightly-colored posters. Neil squints at one: the Army, apparently. 

"What can I do you for, son?" asks the recruiter sitting in the chair. There are pamphlets stuffed into plastic holders on the floor behind him. They're a diverse crowd, the uniformed people pictured, everyone smiling proudly. Neil doesn't trust teeth that white. 

"Just thinking," he says. He can hear earnest voices in the cubicle next to them, but he doesn't have that in him.

"Well, I can tell you a few things you might want to know," the guy says, and strategically shuffles a few pamphlets in his direction.

Neil picks them up mostly to stop the man's slightly manic grin. "I'll see you around," he says. "Thanks."

"Any time," he replies.

After Neil makes his way out of the cramped building, he flips idly through the pamphlets, then folds them and stuffs them into his jeans pocket. It's probably a good thing it's winter, he thinks, because his coat's as good a closet as any.

-

He passes the recruitment center every day off, after that, and sometimes if his shift is cut short, but he never actually goes inside. It's like a talisman, or maybe he's just got some residual military fortitude around his edges now, because whenever someone stops and asks him if he wants a ride, he can say, No.

-

"Neil," Wendy says harshly as he comes into the apartment.

"What?" he groans, tugging unhappily at the neck of his work shirt and dropping onto the couch.

"What the hell are these?" she asks as he's pulling off the yellow polo. Before he can ask her to clarify, please, he's not fucking mind reader, she throws the Army pamphlets down in his lap.

"What do they look like?" he snaps, untangling his arms. "Or can't you read anymore, now that you've been out of school for too long?"

Wendy levels her best poisonous glare at him, but he's almost immune to it, after the decade their friendship has spanned. "You asshole, obviously I can read, that's the problem. What the fuck are these doing in the apartment?"

Neil feels like he's on the precipice of something important. He'd never really devoted much thought to the Army after his initial bored inquiry, but the rage on Wendy's face is fascinating. "Why do you care?" he asks, as cruelly as he can manage.

"Of course I care," Wendy snaps, her Kansas twang sharper than usual, "you're my best friend, Neil, my soul mate, don't you think you should have told me about this?"

The air between them is electrically charged. Neil feels the shock of it in his spine, boiling in the base of his throat, and before he can stop himself he's saying, "I've been doing more than just thinking about it."

Wendy steps back like she's been hit, and he remembers belatedly that her uncle died in active duty a couple years ago. Well, shit. She makes an inarticulate sound of rage and puts her face in her hands, breathing hard, and then throws herself down on the couch next to him. "Fuck me," she says.

"No thanks," Neil answers. He pulls his pack out of his back pocket and gets a smoke out.

Wendy watches him as he lights up and then steals it from him. "That's just it," she says. "How are they gonna react when they find out who you actually want to fuck?"

"It's not that obvious," he says, sulky. "I'm not like Eric."

Wendy takes in his battered wife beater, his ubiquitous choker, the way his hair curls at the base of his skull with unusual fragility. She picks up his hand and starts playing with his fingers. "It's sweet how you delude yourself."

Neil steals the cigarette back and breathes in deep, feeling the cool burn of nicotine. "It doesn't have to be obvious," he amends.

Wendy looks at him sadly. "You're going to do this no matter what I say, aren't you." Her voice is flat enough that it's not really a question.

Neil shrugs. "Maybe," he says. "I don't know yet."

Wendy hits him on the shoulder. "You scare me sometimes, Neil McCormick."

"Sorry," he says. He doesn't sound contrite even to himself, but he almost means it.

-

But in the end, whether it's White Camaro or the fucking Army, Neil can never resist a challenge.

-

He's never been addicted to anything, really, except maybe bad decisions, but he wanders around in a perpetual haze of irritation for a few weeks before everything works its way out of his system. 

"I can't believe you're serious about this," Wendy says, petting his hair back from his face as he sweats out the last of the Vicodin.

"Me neither," Neil admits, "but I guess I must be."

Wendy nods. "Yeah, I guess."

"I have to take a test and everything," he says, almost to himself. "Like the fucking SATs all over again."

"I remember," Wendy reassures him, smiling, "the ASSFAP or whatever."

"ASVAB," he corrects reflexively. Jesus. What has he become.

Wendy shakes her head like she can read his mind and sits down next to him. "I am trying, you know," she says, "to understand this. I don't––I don't want to lose you, Neil, and don't tell me that's too fucking sappy because Jesus, I know it is, but it's true. Okay?"

Neil looks at her solemnly. "Wendy," he says, "I will never leave you."

"That's not even––" Wendy starts.

Neil touches her chin.

"Love you," Wendy says. She presses their foreheads together. "If you don't come back to me," she says, "I'll haul your dead body out of its ugly ass grave and kill it again, you hear me?"

"I hear you," Neil says, "I hear you louder than anyone else."

"Yeah, well." Wendy clears her throat and leans back; her eyes are red but she's not unrecognizable with grief or anything. "Just as long as you know."

-

The morning of, he cuts off the more unforgivably long tendrils of hair with a pair of blunt kitchen scissors and pulls on the only shirt he owns that doesn't make him look kind of like a girl.

Wendy hands him his very last morning cigarette and kisses him on the cheek as he heads out the door. 

"Fuck you," he says, and kisses her back.

"Fuck you too," she says. "Good luck."

-

Second verse, same as the first; a theme and variation.

"What can I do you for, son?" the man asks.

Neil swallows twice and says, "I'm interested in joining the Army."

The man smiles. "I'm Sergeant Michaelson," he says. "I'm the person to ask."

-

Neil mans up and calls his mom three days before he's due to show up in South Carolina and says "yes" to collect.

"Hey, honey," she answers when he says, Hi, "You owe me about four letters, you know."

"Yeah, I know," he sighs.

"Oh," she says, because she's known him longest and loved him best––because he's hers and he'll never forget it. "What?"

"I, uh." He coughs. "I joined the Army."

"Neil," she chokes out. "What? You didn't. Neil."

Neil shifts uncomfortably. He's not exactly given to guilt, but there's a little broken disbelief in her voice that sits heavily in his gut. "No. I mean. I did."

"Oh," she says, faint. "Oh, my little baby."

"Mom," he protests, "I'm not––"

"I know, I know," she says. She's smiling. He can picture her mascara smudged down one cheek, and it makes him inexplicably sad. "You're all grown up. You can make your own decisions. I just. I never expected––"

"I didn't either," he says. "But I. I feel good about it."

"Good, good." Her voice is watery. "That's all I ever wanted for you, Neil."

"Yeah," he says. "Yeah, I know."

"I have to go, honey," she says. "Long distance, you know. But I love you, okay? Write to me, mister."

"Yeah, Mom," he says. "Smoke a cigarette for me."

"Always," she says. "Love you."

"Yeah," he says, and hangs up before they can drag it out any longer.

-

Boot camp's not as bad as he expects it to be. He finds he doesn't mind waking up at the crack of dawn or performing on command, and he gets paired with this kid Ryder who's a wannabe Mormon or something, and they try to keep each other's noses clean. They can't, obviously; the drill sergeant's as much of a sadistic asshole as all the movies say. But they do their best, and they get by.

It's not all fun and games, obviously. Neil's never been any good with people unless he knows exactly what they want from him, and it's not like he can talk about his apple-pie childhood or high school sweethearts. He still has to calculate every interaction, but it's in a new equation, and he misses Wendy so badly it's exhausting.

He mostly keeps his mouth shut and runs a little harder for it. 

At the very end, after the Victory Forge-adrenaline has run out and he's practicing his hospital corners for the very last time, Neil feels a little blossom of something under his breastbone, something he hasn't felt since he was eight years old and Coach said, "That's good, Neil," for the first time. It makes him catch his breath. 

"Pride goeth before a fall," he reminds himself, softly, but he doesn't feel like he's ever risen high enough that a fall would hurt. He's no angel.

-

He goes back to New York because it's a cheaper ticket than Kansas. Wendy throws her arms around him, right there in the station, and whispers, "Neil, Neil, Neil," into his ear.

"Wendy, Wendy, Wendy," he says back at her, grinning despite himself. 

She rubs her head over his shorn hair. "It doesn't suit you," she says, laughing.

Neil shrugs. "It doesn't suit anybody."

"Come on," she says, one arm around his waist, tugging him out. "Let's go home."

-

They go out. Wendy has a boytoy, now, Tim, who clearly worships the ground she walks on––as it should be, Neil thinks, and pushes aside the automatic jealousy that rises in his throat. They leave on the early side, go back to Tim's apartment, because Wendy knows exactly when Neil needs to be alone and she's the best friend he'll ever have.

"Have fun," she tells him. She grasps his chin and looks at him with unusual force. "Be careful, Neil."  
"I will," he promises, and buys another drink, goes home alone.

The next night he picks a guy up at the bar––no mustache, and for once, Neil's the one paying for drinks––and he leads him back by the tie to the apartment. They're kissing, and kissing, clothes and socks strewn on the floor, but as soon as the guy kneels down, Neil feels his hands go cold. 

He tries to ignore it: god, it's good, and it's been so long since he's so much as jerked off. His knees start shaking, though, and he sits down heavily on the bed. The dude (Mark, maybe, or John, something Biblical) looks up at him in confusion, then starts crawling up after him, but Neil puts a foot on his shoulder to hold him in place. "I don't think this is going to work," he says. 

"What?" Mark-or-John asks. "What are you talking about?"

Neil stands up, pushes him roughly aside. "It's not going to work," he repeats, as he pulls on his pants and boxers in one fell swoop.

"What the fuck," says the guy.

Neil turns around and stares at him. "Get the fuck out of my apartment," he says.

Mark-or-John nods nervously and shoves himself back into his clothes. Neil hands him his wallet and points him towards the door.

"Asshole," the guy mutters, but he leaves, stuffing the wallet angrily into his back pocket as he goes.

Neil hopes the guy's drunk enough that he won't remember the apartment clearly, because the next time––Neil checks; huh, he'd been wrong all along––the next time David opens the wallet, he'll realize he doesn't have anything to put in it anymore.

-

Wendy says goodbye with tears in her throat. Neil kisses her and leaves without looking back.

-

The first day's all right, until––

"Your bag is touching mine," says this guy Henderson, who looks like a cornfed folk hero. "Get it off."

Neil nudges the duffel over with his toe. "Sorry," he says. "I didn't know interluggage relations were against the rules."

Henderson rolls his eyes, exaggerated, and mouths something over his shoulder to one of his newly-made best friends. "Just make sure you don't break any more rules where I can see them."

He's got an almost tangible charisma that leaves a bad taste in Neil's mouth. "Whatever you want," Neil says, deadpan. This is going to be fun.

-

Neil detests Afghanistan more than he's detested any other place he's ever seen or been to, but under the all-consuming hatred, he kind of likes it. It's like a country scourged and purified, whipped down to an iron bone––the parts that aren't ruined, anyway. 

But Neil's spent most of his life learning how to swallow his disagreements, so he puts on his boots and moves out when he's told to. Mostly everyone respects his silence: _a little weird, McCormick, but he's all right, works hard._

Neil used to pride himself on standing out in a crowd, on being extraordinary, but he's started to learn the virtue of silence. Invisibility. Henderson calls him a skinny Southern fuck, twice, and Neil doesn't bother correcting him, just smiles sharply and compliments him on his ingenuity. 

He does, however, lose the accent. 

-

The first time Neil sees someone get killed, it's friendly fire and horrific. Chambers was a nice guy, who clapped Neil on the shoulder and genuinely believed that he was serving his country as best as he knew how. There had been reports of insurgents in the area (although, Neil wonders blackly, later, when aren't there) and everybody was nervous despite themselves. Someone had spooked and the next thing, Chambers was down with two bullets to the chest and one to the head, although of course Neil hadn't known specifics then––he'd only seen the red expanse, the choking disbelief. 

Chambers collapses in slow motion, folding in on himself, and that's when Neil knows he's made a mistake.

Mistakes are nothing new, though, and Neil's a pro at ignoring shit, so every time he has to shoot something he lets Chambers's shocked expression loom large, and he's filled just enough blind and directionless rage to get by.

They lose more, good guys, with wives and children and mothers, and all Neil can do is let it fuel him forward into a race he's not sure he wants to run. He holds their faces close, like keepsakes, filling his pockets with memories. 

-

 

He's off-duty, as much as you can be off-duty when you're minutes from a combat zone, and he's got a cigarette out before he can stop himself. It's not a good idea to smoke around explosives, but he's not near them, now, even if he feels like he can never get far enough away.

He leans against a fence, one foot behind him, feeling like a backwards James Dean. He's watching the smoke curl out in front of him when he hears Henderson come up and say something. "What?" he asks. 

"I _said _, the fuck you looking at, homo?" Henderson spits at him.__

Neil raises an eyebrow and blows the smoke directly at him. "You don't have to attack me just because you're insecure in your sexuality, Henderson," he says mildly, voice dry as bones.

Henderson's face is transformed by impotent anger, but one of his buddies puts a hand on his shoulder and says, "Come on, it's not worth it, don't let him get to you," because Neil's got a right hook he knows you don't want to be on the business end of and Henderson's a whiner, at heart, not in what you might call the _good books_ with their sergeant even if he's the apple of every other enlisted man's eye. 

Neil's the asshole in this situation, but he's not afraid to be one, so he raises his other eyebrow and adds, "Listen to your...friend, Henderson."

"Fuck you," Henderson growls, but he trudges on past Neil, his friends throwing glares over their shoulders as they lead him away.

Neil taps the ash onto the ground and smile at them, teeth bared. He hasn't gotten where he is by being nice or docile. Fuck if he'll start now.

-

He'd think Henderson was a fag hiding under all the macho posturing, but he's gotten good at recognizing the signs, and Henderson's hate just doesn't run hot enough.

They go through a lot together, really, when you think about it, rapid cycle alternating between complete terror and abject boredom, the two states that tell you most about a person. Henderson can't shoot as well as Neil can, but he's stronger. He doesn't know how to be quiet. He doesn't know how to be alone. He's a jackass but he'd throw himself in front of gunfire for his fellow soldiers––almost has, twice. 

Neil doesn't quite admire him, but it's a close thing.

He's almost sorry to leave him when the year runs out. Henderson has his nearly innumerable faults, but Neil is dead certain that, on the off chance he ever got his head out of his ass enough to ask someone if they needed a ride, he wouldn't give them anything but a ride. There's something to be said for that.

-

He gets back to the states three days before he turns twenty-one. It doesn't feel like the milestone it's supposed to be.

Wendy rolls a cigarette––just regular old tobacco, no funny business, not with his hair still too short and his dirty uniform folded on a chair––and offers him the first drag.

"No thanks," he says, "I don't do that anymore."

She twists her lips and rubs the top of his hair, as if for luck. "Look at you, McCormick, you're all grown up."  
 He's spent so long rounding out his vowels that her accent, though fainter than it used to be, presses harshly on his ears. "Yeah, well, killing people for fun and profit will do that to you," he says.

"Come on," Wendy says, "it can't have been. I mean. It can't have been––the worst thing ever. You're okay."

Neil coughs out a laugh. "Yeah, sure, I'm fine."

"Neil."

"You don't want to know."

Wendy squirms towards him, bracing her back on his arm. "You don't know that."

"Wendy."

" _Neil._ "

He resettles, crossing his arms. "Once upon a time there was a little boy named Neil," he says.

"If you're not going to be serious about this––"

"I'm deathly serious about this," Neil says. "Once upon a time, this little boy went to war for his country, like all the best heroes." Wendy grabs his hand, for old times' sake, maybe. He can hear her breath rattle in and out as she smokes. "He went to a desert land and learned how to use a gun and fight with his hands. How to protect his country from far away." 

Wendy shifts against him. "Neil," she says uneasily.

He shushes her. "And so this little boy followed his orders and did his duty when he was called, and after months of practice and running around uselessly it ended in explosions and death and skin grafts and blood and broken bones through the skin and blood and blood and blood for other little boys who weren't even as fucked up as the first little boy, until they all came home in an airplane stinking of death."

"Jesus, Neil," Wendy says, hushed. "Jesus."

"Whatever," he says, "it's just another trauma to add to the list." He looks at her, grinning, but her familiar laugh doesn't peal out. She's just staring at him sadly. "Christ," he mutters, "give me the fucking cigarette."

-

The second tour is a lot like the first, except that Neil's better at it, and his pockets are already full.

-

He gets a promotion without expecting it. He'd become proficient by accident, by force of habit, really, so when the Army comes to him and says, _We'd like to do right by you_ , Neil stands to attention and tries to look more appreciative than surprised.

"We've noticed your creativity in the field, McCormick," General Sumner says, and hands over what looks like a nondisclosure agreement. "We'd like to discuss it further."

-

Dom Cobb is, at first glance, three things: middle-aged, vaguely incompetent, and relatively intelligent.

The first two things turn out to be totally false. He's only a few years older than Neil, for all he dresses like a fifty-year-old academic, and although he's mild-mannered and has an unfortunate tendency to bumble, he keeps an iron fist over every aspect of Project Oneiroi.

Relatively intelligent, on the other hand, is a gross understatement. Dom––Neil had tried to call him Mr. Cobb and had gotten laughed down––has a kind of ferocious hunger for knowledge that Neil's never seen before. _Why_ , and _where_ , and _how_ fuel him like normal people are fueled by food, or primetime television. 

It's Dom's complete and utter seriousness about intellectual discovery that keeps Neil from laughing in his face the first time he brings up dream-sharing.

"Are you serious?" he can't help himself from asking, looking down at the innocuous if flashy silver briefcase on the table between them. "Dreaming? This isn't some kind of Candid Camera: Military moment, is it?"

Dom chuckles and shakes his head, opening the briefcase to reveal a worrying number of buttons and tubes. "No, no. I know it sounds far-fetched. It is far-fetched, really, we're still barely in the process of figuring out the uses of this technology. It's not exactly refined, yet." He gives Neil a tight smile. "That's where you come in."

"Huh," Neil says. "Yeah, all right."

The first time they go into a dream together, it's one of Dom's, a cool, oatmeal-colored space with neither door nor windows, not quite concrete enough to be a room and not quite abstract enough to be anything else. 

"It's a little drab, isn't it?" Neil asks.

"Mmmm," Dom agrees, "sorry, my interior decorating skills are lacking."

Neil nods his agreement.

"Why don't you try changing it?" Dom asks.

"What, the room?" Neil looks around. "That's not going to, like. Blow holes in your subconscious, will it?"

"Won't know until we try," Dom says, with a distressing casualness that Neil soon learns is habitual. 

Neil shrugs and points at what could conceivably be a wall. "Come on," he says, when nothing happens, and _thinks_.  
A window appears.

"Good!" Dom says. "Good."

"My head kind of hurts," Neil says, rubbing at the base of his skull with one hand.

"I bet you it doesn't hurt as badly as mine right now," Dom says, but he doesn't look like he's in pain; he looks like he's on the knife-edge of the best high of his life. "This is fantastic."

"Headaches are fantastic?" Neil asks skeptically.

"No, no," Dom corrects him, grinning, "you are fantastic. No one else has been able to manipulate someone else's dream sphere, yet."

"Well, I didn't know I wasn't supposed to," Neil says. 

"And therein lies the marvel of it all," Dom says. "I think we've just been training people too much. Dreaming isn't an exact science. It's time we stopped treating it like it was."

"If you say so," Neil murmurs. "It's just a window."

"Yes," says Dom, "but a window into what? My subconscious? Your subconscious? The collective Jungian unconscious?"

Neil walks over and twitches aside the curtain. All that's behind it is more oatmeal. 

"The frills are an especially quaint touch," Dom adds.

"Fuck you," Neil says, without thinking, and is momentarily shocked at himself. The days of youth are gone, he thinks.

Dom cracks up. "I knew you had a personality in there somewhere."

"Sorry," he mutters, mortified.

"No, no, I'm not part of your military-industrial complex," Dom says.

Neil looks at him.

"Okay, not the part that's going to get you in trouble," he concedes. "More industry, if you will. I've had worse thrown at me by Miss Miles as a morning greeting."

"Miss Miles?" Neil asks.

"Oh," Dom says, "you haven't met Mal yet. I'd forgotten. Well, you will."

"Sure," Neil agrees. "So how do we get out of here, anyway? Unless you want me to make more windows."

"A couch might suffice," says Dom.

Neil turns around to ask if he's serious and gets the muzzle of a gun in the face for his trouble. It's disturbingly lacking in detail, like it's made of some indistinguishable metal and the possibility of violence, like the essence of the word _gun_ has been distilled into a weapon. "What is this?"

"I'm getting us out of here," Dom says, and Neil can see that he's holding an equally vague outline of a gun towards his own head.

"You don't want to do that," Neil tries. He's never been any good at hostage negotiation. This is ridiculous.

"I do," Dom assures him, "I really do."

He pulls the triggers.

-

"You're a sick fuck, you know that?" Neil gasps as they wake up.

"I've heard it before," Dom says, sounding irritatingly calm and collected, like he didn't just form a murder-suicide pact all on his own and go through with it minutes ago. 

"Maybe you should pay attention next time," he cracks, as he pulls out the cannula and looks for somewhere to put it.

"You're good with a needle," Dom says.

Neil looks down; the entry spot is bleeding, a little, but it was a clean withdraw. "I had an exciting adolescence," he says, instead. 

"Ah." Dom nods, but before he can say anything else uncomfortable, the door opens forcefully. Neil hisses a breath out through his teeth.

"Cobb," the beautiful woman in the doorway says, "what did you do this time?"

"You're not American," Neil says dumbly when Dom doesn't answer besides baring his teeth in an almost-grin.

"No, no," the woman says, "I'm French, it's why I have better manners than Dom, here." She hands him a piece of gauze and gives him a long look. "So you're Neil."

"Neil McCormick," he says, holding out a hand for her to shake.

"Nice to meet you," she says. "I'm Mal Miles. Sorry if Dom's traumatized you, he tends to do that to the new people."

"Miss Miles," he says softly.

"Oh no," she warns him, wagging one elegant finger in an exaggerated gesture. "I'm Mal. We don't do formality around here. It doesn't do to wander in each other's heads and wake up and call each other by last names."

"Sure," he says. "Sorry."

"Oh, Neil," she says, her voice soft, "never be sorry for anything you don't have to be. And this, trust me, you need not be sorry for."

"Thank you, Mal," Dom says, "I've got it from here."

"If you're sure," she sniffs. "Don't be afraid to call me in here if you need a break from him. I know what it's like," she says in a stage whisper as she sweeps out, leaving a wash of perfume behind her, heels clicking down the hall. 

He can't get his head around it, the way she's so clearly human under her perfection, like her cardigan and pencil skirt.

"She's not usually so abrasive," Dom says, "we had a bad lab morning, today, that's all."

Neil shakes his head. "That's not abrasive," he says. "Not even close."

Dom smiles and looks out the door as he packs up the PASIV, blind. "I'm going to marry her someday."

"Does she know this?" Neil asks, against his own better judgment.

"Nope," Dom says. "But she will."

"You're a crazy person," Neil says.  
"So they tell me," Dom says cheerily. Neil was not lying. Dom Cobb _is_ a crazy person. "All right, come on, let's go meet the rest of the gang."

"Please never use that word again," Neil says. 

-

The rest of the gang turns out to be Mal, Mal's father, whose name may or may not in fact be Miles Miles, a handful of scientists, and a slightly larger handful of soldiers, all of whom carry with them the visible weight of combat experience.

"McCormick," says one of the soldiers. Neil has to squint to recognize him. "I thought you died."

"Henderson," Neil answers, shaking his hand. "You're very kind."

The tension crackles between them; Dom swoops in and grabs Neil's arm before anything else can happen. Henderson raises his eyebrows at the contact. "I can see you haven't changed much."

Neil rolls his eyes, but doesn't bother to wrest his arm free from Dom's grip. "You know where to find me," he says, instead, on the wrong side of sultry, and manages to cross the room before the combination of Dom's hairy eyeball and Henderson's rage radiating at his back hits him hard enough to make him start laughing. "Henderson's a dick," he says by way of explanation, finally freeing his elbow. "I knew him way back when."

"Huh," says Dom. "Okay. Look, I don't care what happened between you then and I don't really care what happens between you now, but keep it out of my laboratory."

"You seemed pretty fond of grievous bodily harm yourself, there, for a second," Neil points out.

Dom shrugs. "You die in a dream, you wake up."

"I don't want to know how you figured that out, do I?" Neil asks.

"Probably not," Dom agrees. "It involved a lot of intestines."

Neil nods. "Fair enough. How about I take out my aggression on Henderson in the dream world, and you don't stop me."

"No promises," Dom says, but Neil hasn't expected promises from anyone or anything in a long, long time.

-

Dom has an obsessive and painfully obvious crush on Mal, which turns pathetic when they're interacting with each other––Mal gorgeous and difficult, Dom lurching wildly between his natural charisma, when he doesn't think about what he's saying, and disgusting awkwardness, when he does. Neil refuses to watch their non-dream-related conversations on principle.

-

The first time Neil constructs his own dreamspace it starts out all right but, after a few minutes, all the buildings begin to topple over.

"It's no good if they just look okay," Dom had told him, one hand patting his shoulder, twice, lightly, without intent. "Well, it's more complicated than that, it depends not only on your own beliefs but on those of the other people in the dream with you, so maybe if it weren't me, you'd be okay, but since I know architecture––"

"You can tell it's wrong," Neil murmurs. "So basically you have to know just enough of everything to fool people?"

"Something like that," Dom answers way too cheerfully. "Think of it as an opportunity for intellectual growth."

Intellectual growth his ass. Fucker had too many years in school and got brainwashed into liking it.

"No wonder Mal hates you," Neil mutters, and shoots himself out of the dream.

-

The first time Neil constructs his own dreamspace successfully, it's his fourth try, after two straight weeks of mainlining books and articles on architecture and city planning. 

"Nice, very nice," Dom says, nodding, as he looks around for the first time. His voice rings oddly, but nothing falls over from the echo, which is more than he can say for his second time around.

Then Mal steps into the dream and ruins it, immediately shaking her head. "No, no, Neil, you've got it wrong."

"What the hell are you talking about, it's perfect," Dom says sharply.

"That's exactly the problem," Mal retorts. Her curls swing in their ponytail. "It's so stiff."

"I'm trying my best," Neil reminds her.

"I know, Neil, I know," Mal soothes, "and you're doing marvelous work for someone who's been at it for less than a month––but Mr. Cobb here should know better."

"Well, Miss Miles, do tell me," Dom says, "what's wrong with Mr. McCormick's delightful New York landscape?"

Mal stands there, hands on her hips, for several minutes before throwing her hands out and taking one exaggerated breath.

"What are you _doing_?" Dom hisses.

"I'm relaxing," she answers, and as she lowers her hands the deathly silence around them lightens. "There. See? Much more natural."

"How did you do that?" Neil asks, in awe––it looks the same as ever but it feels much more like the real thing, even if it's still preternaturally quiet.

"This isn't just about structure, Neil, it's about the art of the thing, too," she explains. "I'm not worrying so much about the integrity and accuracy of the buildings because, for one thing, you really did take care of that beautifully, and for another, that becomes habit, after a time. You must remember that you are not just a builder. You are a sculptor."

"A sculptor," Neil repeats skeptically.

"Yes, yes," she insists. "The dream is not real. It is hyperreal."

"Huh," Neil and Dom say at the same time. 

"What, do you think I sit in the lab all day and distract the pimply interns with my breasts and fluttering eyes?" Mal asks. 

"Well," says Neil, because he's _seen_ her. Dom just gulps.

"Okay, don't answer that," she revises. "But that's not all I do."

She teaches Neil, then, how to destroy the city around them, while Dom stands in the background, unattractively posed with his hands clasped behind his back.

"You should watch that gut," she tells him right before she takes herself out by stopping her own heart, no weaponry needed.

"My god, she's a wonder," Dom whispers in the wake of her departure.

"You are a piece of work," Neil says, and shakes his head as the dream implodes.

-

Neil gets tired of architecture, so he starts in on biographies.

It doesn't last long––too many fucking heroes.

-

Dom asks Mal out on a date in the middle of the cafeteria, with a candle in one hand and a rose in the other. She punches him on the arm, hard, and then says yes while offering him a Hello Kitty Band-Aid for his unfortunately-placed burns.

There's a video someone on staff uploaded to one of the internal servers. Neil has watched it at least once a day since it happened, usually where Mal or Dom can see him do it. That shit is hilarious. 

They come back to the compound after the date, obviously, since no one in the dreamlab who doesn't have to lives at home anymore, Dom with a red wine stain all up his left leg and Mal with her hair in a complete wreck, but they're gloriously happy, despite it all, and their happiness is contagious. 

-

He soon learns to recognize every member of the team by the way the dream feels: Mal's impressionist flourishes, the way the air is lush and slightly denser than it should be; Dom's bright, pristine signature, so even Manhattan seems clean; Henderson (everyone else calls him Geoff by now, but Neil can't bring himself to) makes his worlds blocky, too earnest. His own dreams remain precise to a fault.

"Let go, Neil, let go," Mal tells him, time after time. "Relax. Like I taught you."

"I can't," he explains, teeth gritted. "Not any more than I already have."

"What are you afraid of?" she asks, her eyes wide and honest, her hands held expressively. "We are dreaming. Nothing can happen to us."

He can only shake his head.

"Perhaps you should try dreaming on your own," Mal muses the next time they're eating lunch together. She is wearing a real flower in her hair––a gift from Dom, Neil knows, though he pretends not to notice it.

Neil shrugs, then covers it up by rolling his shoulders, which are sore after spending the morning working his frustrations out on a punching bag. "That sounds like one of the worse ideas you've had."

"I'm serious," she continues, forking some of her salad onto his plate without his permission, "this way you can explore your own dreamspace without fear of others intruding."

"Maybe next week," he says. 

"You mustn't be afraid to dream a little bigger," Mal says.

"How's Dom?" he asks instead of responding to her bullying. "Fonder of wine than last date?"

"You're a terrible person, Neil," Mal laments, and bites savagely down on a tomato so that it squirts him right in the eye.

-

Neil reads, in order, the Narnia books (too much Jesus), half of Lolita (not enough like the movie), and three Sherlock Holmes novels (Watson's irritating, but there's something about Sherlock's arrogant flamboyance that Neil is irresistibly drawn to).

He writes Wendy a letter. It’s the first in too long; he sticks in a note for his mom too, before he loses his nerve. 

-

People start showing up in the dreams not long after they start getting the process of world-creation formalized and finalized; flickering at the corner of the eye, at first, then slowly solidifying.

"Projections," Dom explains when Neil asks. "It's what we're calling them, anyway. It seems when the brain establishes it's in a stable environment, it starts filling the world with faces––maybe people you know, or once knew, or saw on TV somewhere, maybe just creations––to give it authenticity, or something along those lines. They're perfectly harmless as far as we've been able to tell."

"Okay," Neil says.

He accepts Dom's word as law until the first time he bumps into one of Henderson's projections during an experiment with sedative strength.

"Excuse me," he says, and tries to slip on past her, but––

––the projection lets out an otherworldly scream that draws all of the other projections nearby, like she's a fucking banshee or something, and Neil feels them all grab onto him at once, and then they start pulling.

It becomes excruciatingly painful extremely quickly.

The last thing he sees before it all goes to black is Coach standing over him, sorrow on his face, the knife in his hand dripping from the mercy killing he just made.

-

Neil wakes up and immediately turns over to throw up off the side of the chair. Mal rushes into the control room, calling his name, but Neil pushes her away with as much force as he can muster––not much––and heaves.

"What the shit was that?" Neil rasps as soon as it's over. His entire body is shaking.

Henderson's sitting up, looking disconcerted. "I don't even know what happened," he says. "I lost sight of him a little ways in."

"Your subconscious fucking attacked me," he says, pointing right at Henderson's throat.

Henderson's face distorts. "Well, it's not like I can control how it feels about you."

Neil pulls the IV out of his wrist less carefully than he should and feels his blood well in the needle's absence. "I'm fucking––I'm gone. See you tomorrow," he says, and marches the fuck out of there.

-

No one tries to stop him. By now, everyone understands that dreaming is a touchy business.

-

It happens again, and again, and again, by some awful rote.

"Who was that man?" Mal whispers.

Neil doesn't vomit, but it's a close thing. "I don't know what you're talking about," he says.

"Of course you do," she says, but she doesn't press.

-

He starts going in by himself, after all––just five minutes at a time, enough to dream up a world and watch it crumble should he let it.

He ends up scanning his own projections like radar. Coach isn't always there, but he usually is, behind a newspaper or tucked away into a corner. Sometimes he's holding onto Brian's small hand. _St. Nicholas_ , Neil thinks vaguely, uncertainly, and wishes he'd mop up the constant nosebleed.

They never do go away, just stand there looking solemn. Eventually he gives up trying to get them to.

-

"Let's try something new," says Ilse, who is technically an anesthesiologist but who calls herself a chemist since she makes so many of her own compounds. She's new enough to still be intrigued for intrigue's sake, but she's got the fever already, he can tell; they all do, the ones who are still here so many months in. Even Henderson. Even Neil.

He hops up onto his lawn chair. "Fire away."

Ilse looks at him wryly. She is very tall, the deep brown of her skin oddly warm in among all the grayish tile and sterile instruments. "Perhaps a bit less of that than is normal for you."

"What, firing?" he asks, rolling up his sleeve. "I'm almost never woken up by something so mundane as a gun wound anymore."

"You worry me, McCormick," Ilse says; Mal's insistence on universal informality doesn't always take with the newer ones, at least not right away. "A gunshot, mundane."

"Well, compared to––"

"I don't want to know," Ilse interrupts, adjusting the PASIV tubing. "Mal's supervising."

"Not Dom?"

"Busy convincing Henderson to stick it out a little longer," Ilse says. 

Neil nods; Henderson's not a bad soldier or even, underneath it all, a bad person, but he's got all the subtlety and sophistication of an ugly trout going up shit creek. "Don't know why," he says. "Not the best dreamer."

Ilse shrugs. "I don't ask these things. Ask no questions, tell no lies, et cetera, et cetera. Okay, lie back, Mr. McCormick. Mal will be here in a second."

"Sure thing," Neil agrees, and waits for his fade to black.

It comes soon enough, and he opens his eyes to a rosy dawn of a world; clearly Mal's work, not her best but with a beautiful gauzy overlay that makes him feel like he's in a land protected.

He's not, of course. _They_ are always here somewhere, and every brain has its mines, no matter how lovely. It'll do for now, though.

"Neil," Mal calls. He cranes his neck around, but she isn't anywhere in sight. "We're doing an experiment today."

"My favorite," Neil yells back, voice heavy with sarcasm. 

"No need to shout, I can hear you perfectly."

"Where are you?"

"That's what you'll want to figure out."

Neil looks around, frustrated. "How?"

"Just look," Mal's voice says. Then the silence echoes. She's gone.

He rolls his eyes and shuffles his shoulders like wings, irritated. Then, there, out of the corner of his eye, a pink grosgrain ribbon that just matches the sky is pinned onto a convenient tree trunk. It's a little tattered, but it is, unmistakably, Mal. He walks to it and pulls it off; written inside, in her neat hand, is _Le coeur a ses raisons_.

"I don't speak French," he mutters, and the letters dissolve into an arrow. Neil ties it around his wrist and turns left. 

The next piece of Mal takes a bit of searching. The landscape doesn't change much, and the back of his throat is stinging with thirst and his hands are clammy––the sun's pleasant ambient heat is slowly becoming overwhelming––when he spots a glass bottle hanging from a branch. It's unlabeled, tied with a similar ribbon, and of course, it's just out of reach.

Neil rolls his eyes and hoists himself up. 

He has to break off a twig ( _Sorry, Mal_ , he thinks) and dream it a pointy, silverish tip just so he can pick apart the knot that's securing the bottle to the tree. He looks nervously around, but the area is still deserted. Mal's projections must not mind him being here, or maybe the change was so small that they haven't noticed, or else Mal's just got more control than he's used to people having. He's thankful, whatever the reason.

He twists off the cap, the metal points digging uncomfortably into his fingertips, and takes a drink from the water that has appeared inside. It's sparkling like it can't help itself, like Mal has so infused it that it ignores Neil's Kansas sensibilities and fills to the brim with Paris instead. Neil doesn't mind too much.

He's about drunk his fill when he sees them lurking at the bottom of the tree, hand in hand, nothing out of the ordinary; Coach watching Brian, Brian examining his free hand's fingernails. Then Coach glances up at him––Neil flinches and drops the bottle.

"Oh," Coach says, surprised, and disappears. The bottle smashes to pieces where he'd been standing, on the tree roots sticking up from the ground. Brian, bereft of adult supervision, picks up one of the larger shards and swallows it. Neil feels bile rise in his throat as Brian's small body coughs wetly and disappears, too.

"Neil?" Mal calls. She sounds faintly worried underneath the distance warping her voice. "Are you coming? Have you seen something?"

"I'm fine, I'm getting there," he responds.

"Good boy," she says approvingly. 

He feels ill but ignores it, clambers down hand over fist. He picks through the glass until he finds the bottle cap, which has two perfectly round red drops on its back––blood, he realizes belatedly. He turns it over quickly. _Something wicked this way comes_ , it reads.

Neil's thumbs are prick-free. He pockets the cap and looks around for the next sign.

It's not too long in coming: two macarons, one chocolate, one coconut, tied together with the ubiquitous ribbon. Neil eats both as he keeps searching for the next clue, which turns out to be a pair of high heels with a bow hidden inside, and the next, a red poppy lain neatly on the flat of a large rock. He feels as though he's looking at Mal through some intimate kaleidoscope.

He's in the middle of a green, newly-shorn field when his eyes start playing tricks on him, Coach flickering in and out at the corners, alternately cradling and dragging Brian, who's bleeding from the nose and mouth. He shakes his head and tries to will them to disappear.

"Stop following me," he says, finally, brandishing the poppy like it's a weapon. "Leave me alone."

"I don't think you want me to do that," Coach says. It's a mild enough rebuke, but Neil's chest automatically clenches tight––in guilt or disappointment, he can't tell. 

"Neil?" Mal yells. "Neil, are you with me?"

Neil's too busy backing away from Coach's predatory stare to answer. "I think I do," he says, but he's not sure, still, probably never will be. Mal's voice reaches an anxious crescendo; Neil blocks it out. She's not here. Her concern is irrelevant.

Coach walks faster than any person should be able to until he's standing right in front of Neil, Brian forgotten behind them. He caresses Neil's cheek. "You always were my favorite," he whispers. 

"Get off me," Neil orders.

"You don't want that," Coach says. "I'm pretty sure you don't want that, sweetheart."

"He never called me that," Neil says fiercely. "He would never––"

"How can you be so sure?" Coach asks. Neil closes his eyes as Coach trails his hand down to Neil's waist, his fingertips just brushing underneath his shirt. "He thought about you. You thought about him. You still do."

Neil enjoys the pure sensation for a few moments before he's hit with nauseating vertigo. He grabs Coach's wandering fingers and forcibly removes them from his body. "I stopped a long time ago."

"Clearly not," Coach answers dryly; he doesn't try to get out of Neil's hold, just turns his fingers around and links their hands together. "Because here I am."

"Here you are," Neil says. "Yeah, here you are." 

Coach reaches forward with his free hand and Neil punches him in the mouth so hard he falls backward, blood dripping from his gums. Neil dreams up sparklers and sticks them in Coach's mouth and forces bundles of them into his hands, kicks him in the side of the head. Then he runs. He doesn't make it too far before he has to throw up.

Mal finds him hyperventilating under a tree, Coach's burned body less than ten yards away; he's still alive, but he's not moving. Neil keeps picturing the now-blackened fingers resting under his shirt, leaving crumbling dust in their wake, until his entire body has been covered by Coach's residue. 

"Neil, Neil," Mal says, running to him. The sun's heat has lessened considerably but he's burning from the inside out, like a fever has taken hold of him; he can't breathe, he can't breathe, he can't breathe. "What has happened?"

Neil shakes his head and focuses on the in-out motion his chest should be making and isn't. His throat is swelling shut and he can't see so well and his entire world is narrowed down to Coach, to Coach's absence. He feels like he's been uprooted. 

"My god," Mal says, "your heart is beating fit to burst." He can feel her smiling at him but he can't do anything about it; her eyebrows worry their way together."Don't burst, Neil. I don't have enough time to train another one of you."

She gingerly starts to put an arm around his shoulder and he panics, reaches out, extends the field in as many directions as he can and starts running again, Mal swearing behind him. But the world isn't big enough, he can tell, and it's never going to be, so he dreams up a cliff and an ocean and a ceaselessly dark sky, and then he jumps into it all. 

-

He wakes up with a start, Mal blinking to consciousness beside him. 

"What did you do?" Mal asks, staring at him, eyes hard, as she tugs her IV out.

"What?" Neil asks, dislodging his own needle. He feels like he's not quite synced up with reality yet; Coach flickers in and out of his vision, an old TV screen, a war wound. 

"You changed my world," Mal explains. "You changed what I built entirely. How did you do that?"

Neil shrugs and looks away. "I don't––I don't know, I just. I freaked."

The intensity leaves her and she _tsks_ at him without rancor. "Sorry, sorry," she apologizes, "I have not seen that before. I was curious." 

Neil palms the back of his neck uncomfortably. "I don't know," he says again, as honestly as he knows how. He really doesn't. "I just didn't want to be there anymore and I wasn't."

Mal nods, then looks at him more closely. "That man," she says.

Neil rolls his eyes. "I don't know what you're talking about," he asserts.

Mal sits on the edge of her chair. "If you’re sure. But perhaps you had better come to my house for some tea tonight, yes?"

He weighs it against his other most likely option, sitting alone on his decrepit couch with a mug of bad coffee and the TV blaring some terrible straight-to-cable movie while he tries and fails to get Coach out of his head. "Yeah, okay," he says. "Why not."

-

He stops by the base post office on his way to Mal’s; Wendy’s note is short–– _Hey asshole,_ it says, _your mom loves you and so do I, but Jesus Fucking Christ, could you maybe talk to us a little more often? Anyway, glad to hear you finally learned how to read real good, ha ha. I hated Sherlock Holmes in high school but whatever floats your boat. Write back longer and so will I._

He folds it up and tucks it in his wallet. His heart feels all burnt up.

-

Mal doesn't actually have any tea and her couch isn't much better than Neil's, so he winds up sitting on broken springs with a mug of bad coffee anyway. The company's better, at least; Mal doesn't have cable. He sips and stops himself from grimacing. 

"So now that we have met all basic needs of truly civilized people," Mal says, taking a drink and wrinkling her nose, "god, that's _awful_ , isn't it, I'm sorry––now that we are set, let us talk."

"What about?" Neil asks, although of course he knows; to shoot past the horizons of someone's mind like that can't be normal. He hopes vaguely they're not going to kick him out of the program. 

"About you, of course," Mal says, sipping her coffee absentmindedly and then grimacing again, setting it on a coaster far away from her caffeine habit. "About you and your miraculous escape."

“It wasn’t exactly miraculous,” Neil mutters.

“Miraculous,” Mal insists. “Innovative. Daring.”

“Dangerous,” Neil says.

“That too,” Mal agrees, nodding. “Not something I want to have happen again, but Neil,” and she puts a hand on his arm, squeezes gently, her expression terrifyingly earnest, “aren’t the most marvelous things always the most dangerous?”

“Maybe,” he says hesitantly. “But we know each other––what if it was Henderson? What if it was someone else? What could I have done then?”

“So what if it was Henderson?” Mal laughs, waving it away. “You would have figured out a way to escape then, too, Neil, you’re a survivor, anyone can see it. But I think the real question is, where it’s getting gummed up for me is, what would have happened if I had been you, the dreamer, and you had been someone else, you but more evilly-intentioned––how then can you stop evil-you from just blasting your way out of someone’s mind like that?

Neil’s mind is a total blank. “I don’t know,” he says.

“Me neither,” Mal admits, “there’s the trouble; of course we could go to Dom with it tomorrow, but he’s always so smug.”

Neil nods distractedly; Dom is smug whenever he figures something out before Mal, that’s undeniable, but he’s just flashed back to the poster on his guidance counselor’s wall, that endless upward staircase, the deep unceasing pit of Midwestern poverty, and he says, his voice oddly distant to his own ears, “Do you have a pencil and some paper?”

“Of course,” Mal says, and sashays to the tiny corner desk, her heels clicking on her ancient linoleum floor, producing a legal pad and an ancient carpenter’s pencil, and after tearing off a page he smudges around with it for a second before starting to sketch out the staircase. He’s never been much of an artist, but the lines come out clean and his hand’s surer than he’d expected it to be.

“Escher,” Mal murmurs before he’s half through, as soon as the third corner comes into view. “I see the potential, of course, but how does it apply? We were not on stairs, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

Neil abandons the drawing and turns the piece of paper over, considering the pencil before abandoning that too. “I don’t know,” he says honestly. “You’ve got to transfer the, the, the idea of it without the actuality, although I suppose you could put some actual staircases in as well.”

“Something difficult to navigate and self-contained,” Mal says, tapping her lip. “Changeable if you know the layout but impossible to control if you don’t.”

“A maze?” Neil tries. “More organized than just recreating a city or making up something from scratch.”

“A maze,” Mal says, and thinks. “I mean, sure, why not, that’s just an extension of what we’re already doing, and you’d probably be able to trick the non-dreamer into not realizing it––”

“Or if you made a really good maze with everything in the right place they might just not notice,” Neil points out.

“Oh, Neil,” Mal sighs, “always you have such a grasp on the length and breadth of human stupidity. Okay, so they either won’t notice or we’ll make it impossible for them to notice, then what? A maze still has a beginning and an end, unless,” and she gets excited, a little louder, “unless we somehow make those the same place!”

Neil reaches for the paper and pencil, tears a strip off and makes an ugly black dot at both ends. He twists the strip with a flick of the wrist that feels expert though it’s been years since he’s done this, and brings the black dots together. “So we figure out a way to do that.”

“Mobius and Escher,” Mal says, “God help me, all right. So we create the landscape and the maze, disguise the fact that the entry and exit are essentially the same point, guard that point somehow, and then––”

“They’re trapped,” Neil says. “They’re stuck in a maze, there’s only one route of escape, and so if they try to extend the boundaries of the maze, the dreamer can stop them because they’ll have to do it through the entry-exit area––”

“Otherwise the recursive nature of the maze will just––what, I suppose we’ll experiment––”

“Probably it’ll just rebound and make it even harder to get out,” Neil says, “or at least that’s what I’d assume. I don’t know. Maybe it won’t work and you can just force your way past it, I mean it’s not exactly foolproof––”

Mal scoffs, clasps his hands and kisses him on the cheek. “We are geniuses,” she says, “but you are especially so.” She reaches for her coffee, which is no doubt cold by now, and gestures for him to do the same. “A toast! To us! To elegant solutions!” 

“To us,” Neil repeats, and drinks his shitty coffee down.

-

She breaks out the considerably better (although still pretty shitty, really) wine about an hour later and switches on the local channel that alternates between old black and white movies and infomercials all night, and he falls asleep on her shoulder, Basil Rathbone flickering underneath his eyelids.

-

Dom’s thrilled and hardly smug at all when they show it to him the next day. “Of course the maze,” he says, “that we always knew––”

“We did _not_ ,” Mal says, “God, Dom.” 

“Anyway, of course the maze, but the Mobius strip is sheer inspiration,” he says, clapping Neil on the shoulder, one arm already tucked around Mal’s waist. “I can’t wait to try it out, wait till we mess with all the architects’ minds with this one, huh?” 

“Sure,” Neil says, easily, like that was his goal all along and like this isn’t a ham-fisted attempt to control his own subconscious, to delineate some kind of boundary he’ll have to follow whether he wants to or not, the first time in his whole life he’ll be forced to toe the line. “Fucking with the architects sounds good.”


End file.
